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# Floats? (was Re: Wishful thinking)

- Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 11:15:52 PST
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- In-Reply-To: <9601171237.aa04502@forney.scinc.com> (message from ThwartedEfforts on Wed, 17 Jan 1996 10:34:47 PST)

        I'm very dubious about adding floating point numbers.

    Knuth points out that floats are almost never useful unless

    a -- You're dealing with really large or really small values (6.023 x 10^23)

    b -- You have not taken the time to work out the reasonable
    range of output values.

    Of course, if you had a MOO that represented the entire universe
    you might need it... but I'm sure that there would be a lot of lag
    if you had one object per star...

    The problem is that floats are slow and can be large.

        /t

    Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com, tom@weirdos.com

    Verge's "Little Idiot" -- Music for the mentally peculiar.
    1-800-WEIRDOS           http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html

Follow-Ups:

- Re: Floats? (was Re: Wishful thinking)

- From: Christopher Scott Delaney <cdelaney@indiana.edu>

References:

- Re: Wishful thinking

- From: ThwartedEfforts <abakun@scinc.com>

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